Location: Wisconsin....about 100 miles south of the Frozen Tundra and 70 miles east of Camp Randall

Posts: 9,745

Quote:

Originally Posted by ship2shore

I hope this post is far enough past the tornado disaster in Moore/Oklahoma City to start asking some serious questions.

Those poor children and staff in the Elementary schools had prior warning... a good number of minutes if my facts are correct. They simply had no safe place to go. Oklahoma City has been hit by more than 10 major tornadoes in the last 10 years. Tornadoes are no "fluke" in that area.

Why, in the name of sanity, did these places not have storm shelters??? No money???

They had playgrounds, fully equipped gymnasiums, full landscaping on the grounds and many other amenities. If I was a parent, I would INSIST on a safe storm shelter for the children BEFORE any of this relatively-spurious stuff was installed. Or I would fundraise like a M-F and pay for it via the parents committee. It simply boggles my mind that this goes on and people have to die before anything is done.

I have a friend who is a meteorologist for one of our local tv stations, who spent 10 years near OKC attending school and then working there. He says that the ground in that part of Oklahoma is solid bedrock starting just a few feet below the surface top soil. It is EXTREMELY hard and expensive to build underground storm shelters. So much so that the homes are built to have a completely isolated interior room as the storm shelter....and you cover yourself with a mattress or something like that.

That is totally different from where I live in Wisconsin where EVERY building except mobile homes have underground basements. The underground here is much more conducive to building these type of buildings.

I had read that the school systems in and around OKC were building underground storm shelters a few at a time.....it seems that the two schools hit in Moore had not had them built yet.